P'town Murders: A Bradford Fairfax Murder Mystery

by Jeffrey Round

  "Ring any bells?"

  "Nah," Perry said, picking up a glass and retrieving his dry cloth.

  Liar, Brad thought.

  Perry looked him in the eye. "What did you say you did again?"

  "Inventor."

  "Yeah, right," he said, returning to the far end of the bar. "No, I never heard of a guy named Ross who worked at any guesthouse here."

  "Well, no matter," Brad said with a smile. "I've had my heart broken by better men than him."

  After that, the handsome barkeep found one excuse after another to avoid talking. Brad could see he was getting nowhere, so he downed his drink and left.

  9

  Brad stopped in at the police station. Tom Nava sat with his feet up on the desk, eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses. He was dressed like a motorcycle cop, the kind some men fantasized would stop them for speeding out on some deserted road and teach them a lesson they'd never forget. And never want to.

  Nava stirred and turned his head at Brad's entrance.

  "Good afternoon, Officer Nava," Brad said, watching himself approach in the cop's lenses.

  Nava nodded. "Mr. Fairfax. To what do 1 owe the pleasure?"

  Brad smiled. Take it slow, he reminded himself. Cops are always looking out for what you don't tell them.

  "I haven't been able to sleep after what happened the other night. I'm curious to hear who the boy was or if you've learned anything about him. I thought it might give me some peace of mind."

  The cop lifted his feet from the desk and stood with the sleekness of a cat. His chest strained the fabric of his uniform. His shoulders were massive, the waistline narrow, like an oversized Tom of Finland doll. A holster strapped to his belt displayed the handle of a hefty gun. The man was dressed to kill in more ways than one.

  "There's not much to tell," Nava said. "Boy's name was James Shephard. He'd been in town all summer doing odd jobs. Bit of a wanderer, from what I gather. We tracked down some people who knew him from another city."

  Brad shook his head. "A real shame, a young kid like that."

  Nava grunted. "It happens. People think it's just water, but the ocean isn't the same as a swimming pool. The tide can play tricks with you. It's hard to know what he was doing out there on the dunes at night. Just a guess, but I'd say he was cruising. We found his clothes about a half mile up the beach."

  "You think he was looking for sex?"

  Nava looked him over before answering. "That would be my guess. Lotta moral degenerates around this town," he said.

  "Why 'degenerates'?"

  The cop snorted. "It's one thing to be gay; it's another to fuck' anywhere at random."

  "The dunes after dark is hardly random," Brad said with a shrug. "But I guess you'd need to understand the mind of a gay man."

  "I am a gay man," Nava said.

  Whoa!thought Brad. "Then you should understand the urge to explore the sexual side of things."

  Nava removed his sunglasses and Brad caught his powerful eyes in the light for the first time.

  "I may be gay," Nava replied, "but I'm not a moral degenerate."

  So you've got a narrow personality range and a penchant for being a power broker, Bradford thought. Big deal! Being unimaginative doesn't make you morally superior.

  "I guess you don't need to live your life in full color, like some men," Brad said.

  The cop stared at him for a moment and then laughed. "Do I look beige?" he asked, and suddenly Brad had to laugh as well.

  Brad could see Nava wasn't the type to avoid a fight, but he was probably smart enough to avoid starting one. He could imagine him as a boy trying to make it in white America, full of resentment and envy. As an outcast, you sometimes tried harder than others did. Brad could relate. As a ward of the state, his own life had been shattered into a thousand pieces. Whatever he'd had as a child of a single parent had been lost completely when his father died. Ever since then his journey had been to find those pieces and put himself together again.

  Where others in his situation might just let everything go, thinking it hopeless, Brad persevered. Meanwhile, the courts quibbled over the contents of his father's will, stealing the greater part of it. When Brad turned eighteen they awarded him the crumbs, like a discharged prisoner being handed his belongings in a bag at the end of his sentence. He knew he didn't have a lifetime of funds, and decided to make do with what he had. He'd enrolled in journalism school and in four years had the makings of a career. That had stood him in good stead till Grace intervened and spun his life in a whole new direction.

  "Were there any drugs in his system?" Brad asked.

  Nava stared at him. "Why?"

  "I didn't get much of a chance to talk to you last night..."

  "You told me what I needed to know."

  "But I didn't tell you everything. Does the name Ross Pretty mean anything to you?"

  Nava's eyes narrowed. "Yes, it does. I was the investigating officer on that one, too. Pretty died of an overdose of Ecstasy."

  "I just wondered if the deaths could be related."

  "I doubt it. This kid didn't OD—he drowned. There were trace amounts of THC in his system, which means he probably smoked up sometime in the last week. But he wasn't on anything when he died."

  Brad felt deflated. He'd hoped to discover some similarity, no matter how small, between the two deaths.

  "What do you know about Pretty?" Nava asked.

  "I've come to claim his body."

  "You his lover?"

  "No." Brad shook his head. "I was once, but that was years ago. He gave me power of attorney when we split up. That's why I'm in P'Town. But a little bird whispered in my ear that his death might not be accidental."

  Nava cocked an eyebrow at him. "How so?"

  Bradford told him what Cinder had said regarding the circumstances of Ross's death.

  "We know about Rosengarten," Nava said scornfully. "He's a real piece of work. One day he'll cross a line and get himself arrested. He just hasn't come close enough yet."

  Brad wondered what Nava would think if he told him he was going to Rosengarten's guesthouse that evening. He decided against it.

  "In any case," Nava said, "I can't get too excited by the accusations of a professional drag queen. I've got enough to keep me busy making sure the tourists don't do things to get themselves killed. We've also got a Category Five hurricane headed up the coast and I'm trying to get prepared in case it hits."

  Something occurred to Brad. "Where was Ross's body found?"

  "In his apartment at the east end of Commercial. He was slumped over a shrine of some sort in his bedroom. Lot of incense and orange peels scattered on a board propped up on a stack of bricks."

  Brad nodded. "Ross was a Buddhist," he said.

  "In any case, the Ross Pretty investigation is officially closed. I don't see any reason to reopen it."

  "Who told you to look for Ross's body?"

  "A call came through to the office."

  "Scratchy, ragged voice?"

  "Yeah. That's right. Why?"

  "That was the same person who called me at home. Sounds like somebody knew something. I'd say you might want to check into it a little more."

  Back at his guesthouse, Brad phoned Grace to let her in on the strange turn of events. The operator put him through immediately.

  "Good to hear from you, Red," she said.

  He gave a rundown of the happenings of the previous two days, beginning with his discovery of James Shephard's body, Cinder's unexpected revelation about Ross, and his intention to visit the mysterious guesthouse that evening.

  "I thought you were attending a family funeral," Grace broke in.

  "Ross was family to me," he said defensively. "He was the closest thing I had to a brother."

  This much was true and it was all in his records. Brad was pretty sure Grace knew about his past, but she'd allowed him to come to Provincetown regardless. Still, she could have jumped all over him for lying if she'd wanted to.

&nbs
p; Grace drew a breath. "I don't know how you do it, Red, but you always seem to end up where the shit flies."

  "If it's all right with you, I'd like to stay here another day or two. My gut tells me these deaths are connected."

  "I might be able to let you stay a little longer than that."

  "You mean I'm not going to New York?"

  Brad held his breath. As far as he was concerned, New York was as uninhabitable as the dark side of the moon, (though he hesitated to admit this to his gay acquaintances). New York was the litmus test of gay style, but even a few minutes in the town of towns assaulted his senses and left him reeling.

  Everyone he knew who moved to New York came back changed beyond recognition, if they came back at all. One friend, a soft-spoken lesbian named Sally, moved to Manhattan to study acting. In a month, she was having phone conversations at the top of her voice. Within two months, she was uttering every thought that passed through her head. She'd completely lost her subtext.

  On a good day, Brad simply said New York didn't work for him. On a bad day, he thought of it as the Calcutta of the West. In actual fact, he didn't believe New York worked for anybody apart from a handful of snobbish culture queens and one know-it-all author of gay bedtime stories and opera quiz books who was so unpleasant he had to live there because he'd have been murdered anywhere else. If they didn't live in New York, there'd be no one left apart from a colony of immigrants who never made it upstate and a tribe of singer-actors straight off the farm who didn't know any better.

  The first time Brad had been assigned to New York for a two-month stint, he pleaded with Grace to take him off the case.

  "Why?" she'd demanded.

  "It's like that, uh, movie with Judy Garland?" he began, unsure how familiar the reference was outside of Gay. "And she goes to this place that everyone says is the most fantastic place..."

  "Are you talking about The Wizard of Oz?"

  "Yes! You know it?"

  Grace grunted. "Doesn't everyone?"

  "Well, anyway... by the time she gets there she's decided she hates it. It doesn't work for her, you see. Just like it doesn't work for me."

  "Oz?"

  "New York."

  "Oh, I see. An analogy."

  "Anyway... that's how I feel about it. A lot of fake wizards hiding behind curtains, when we all have what we need already..."

  "'And there's no place like home, there's no place like home

  Brad was stunned into silence.

  "Shall I change your code name to Dorothy?" Grace asked.

  "If you'd like to be Aunty Em."

  "Fine, but no dice. You're going."

  Luck was with him this time, however. Grace had decided to keep him on the coast.

  "I know how much you like the Cape. For now, stay where you are and see what you can dig up. Something may develop."

  "Will do. And Grace...?"

  "Yes, Red?

  Once again Brad found himself wondering who in the world this person was with whom he'd shared such intimate details of his life.

  "Thanks... for the flowers."

  "You're welcome. By the way, how much is that visit to the guesthouse going to cost us?"

  "Five thousand."

  "Egad! Well, you'd better be extra careful. At that rate, I can't afford to send you flowers personally if anything should happen to you."

  10

  Brad stared over his laptop toward the dunes. He'd struck out with his earlier attempt to get information on Rosengarten and his guesthouse. Even the police didn't seem overly concerned about the place. Maybe he needed to dig a little deeper. He wondered if the house itself might be the key to whatever was going on.

  Finding information about a specific address on the Internet was a crapshoot, he knew, but finding information on a specific house without an address might be just about impossible. He looked up 'Historic P'Town Houses'. Several thousand sites came up immediately. He breezed through a dozen without finding anything useful. He needed a new strategy. What had Cinder said? That it was really old. Of course, to a drag queen that could mean just about anything.

  He typed 'Original P'Town Houses.' That brought up considerably more sites—in fact, there were far more sites than there were houses in Provincetown. He scrolled through a number of entries. Articles from the Times, Fodor's, and various travel guides topped the list. Halfway down the third page he came across a site relating how in the early 1800s some of the town's houses had been sailed across the harbor from Long Point back when the town's inhabitants were seamen who followed the schools of fish almost literally. Because of their tendency to change locations, one newspaper of the day declared the houses "subject to the most unnatural of laws, not being anchored to any land."

  Brad laughed out loud. It was probably the first reference to anything unusual about a place that was in time to become noted for the unusual. Photographs showed a few of the original houses still in existence. What else had Cinder said? That it sat on the crest of a hill in the northwest end of town. It also had a widow's walk.

  He narrowed it down to three places, all located at the crest of a hill. One house had originally been a storage place for huge blocks of ice cut in winter and sold in summer to preserve the season's catch. It had been dubbed "The Ice House." Brad clicked on the thumbnail print and watched it size into view. There was a widow's walk!

  The Ice House had a colorful history, having been variously a tavern, an inn and a popular whorehouse where two presidents were rumored to have visited. By the mid-1800s, the house had been turned into a stagecoach stop.

  During the War Between the States, the Ice House became the basis of underground railroad operations on the Cape, providing an escape route for runaway slaves. A series of double closets were employed to hide escapees from southern marshals who came looking for them. Dozens of escaped slaves were hidden there before being shipped north through Maine and on to Nova Scotia. Near the end of the war the house mysteriously burned one cold winter night, killing six runaways and four members of the owner's family.

  Brad went back to the search engine and typed in 'Ice House, P'Town.' It yielded two results. The first simply gave a brief mention of the house. The second site offered a more detailed account of its history. In 1870, an eccentric entrepreneur named Jeb Lacey had rebuilt the Ice House for his mother's retirement home. A wood exterior was scored with chisels to make it resemble stone and then overlaid with paint and plaster to give it a New York brownstone look. Lacey had the interior decorated with exotic wallpaper from places as far away as Paris and China. Tin ceilings and marble fireplaces were installed throughout. The second floor was famed for housing a fossil display and a collection of arctic memorabilia from one Admiral Donald MacMillan.

  Lacey did everything to make his mother comfortable while he plied the lumber trade up and down the New England coast. He had a cupola and a widow's walk built for her to watch his schooners sailing in and out of the harbor. By the time it was finished, the house was so different from the rest of Provincetown that it was ridiculed by the townspeople. To make things worse, Lacey's mother came to be known for her strange attire, her big-city affectations, and the peacocks tut-tutting through her gardens. Both she and the house were shunned.

  Jeb's visits to sea grew longer. Ignored by the locals and left alone for months at a time by her son, Maud Lacey retreated to her cupola with its superior view of the harbor. One day she was found pacing the widow's walk, emaciated and dressed in peacock feathers, mumbling as she stared out over the harbor. Jeb had his mother hospitalized, never to return to her home.

  After her death in 1901, there were frequent reports of strange occurrences and unusual noises around the house. Locals of the time believed her ghost haunted the place. Several claimed to have seen a woman's figure stalking the widow's walk on stormy nights. Others suggested it was Jeb Lacey, also gone mad, obsessively restaging his mother's weary vigil like an early Norman Bates.

  Lacey died a reclusive bachelor in 1925 and th
e property changed hands once again. A genteel couple ran it as a boarding house for the elderly. While not particularly profitable as a rest home, the house did exceptionally well as a liquor smuggling operation during Prohibition. The famed slave closets, faithfully reinstated by Lacey, proved useful for hiding contraband as it became a safe house once more.

  Another quarter of a century passed. In the 1950s, a wealthy Bostonian named George Taft purchased the property. While Taft had no need to open his doors for economic reasons, he nevertheless ran his bed and breakfast as part of a group nicknamed The Triple L or Lovely Landlady's League. For the third time in its history the Ice House became a different kind of safe house, providing refuge to the emerging community of homosexuals who had begun to discover P'Town in earnest. It wasn't long before the Ice House became renowned as one of the first gay-owned guesthouses on the Cape.

  Taft ran it until his death in 1976 at the hands of a churlish house-boy who drowned his employer in a goldfish pond in the adjacent gardens during a fit of pique over a banished disco record. At that point the house went to two men from New Orleans who saw it as their dream home. They prospered until the dream turned to a nightmare during the HIV epidemic. Both owners died a month apart in 1986.

  After that, the house disappeared entirely from the town annals. It might have been burned to the ground a second time and never rebuilt. No mention of it was to be found from that date till the present, as though a conspiracy of silence had successfully concealed its notoriety.

  Bradford closed his laptop and sat back. The house's history was certainly a fascinating one. But why had it disappeared for the last seventeen years? Maybe he'd find out on his intended visit that evening.

  He headed to the bathroom, peeling off his clothes and leaving them in a heap on the floor. He showered and reemerged from the steam, wrapping a towel around his waist. Next, he shaved and dressed in Bergdorf Goodman chic, glad he'd brought his jacket, and taking care to insert false business cards into his wallet.

  Done, he turned to the mirror. The results met with his approval. If you're going to walk with the lions, he told himself, you have to dress like one! It was the sort of thing his father might have said.